A Google Competition, With a Robotic Moon Landing as a Goal

A concept of a Team Italia rover expected to compete for the Lunar X Prize, a contest Google hopes will spur exploration. Credit
Team Italia

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — More than three decades after the last Apollo astronauts roamed the lunar surface, disparate universities, open-source engineers and quixotic aerospace start-ups are planning to start their own robotic missions to the Earth’s barren cousin.

The return to the moon is part of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition sponsored by Google with $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home.

At Google’s headquarters here on Thursday, 10 teams from five countries announced their intention to participate in the competition. They include a team led by William L. Whitaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and renowned roboticist; an affiliation of four universities and two major aerospace companies in Italy; and one group that is a loose association of engineers coordinating their efforts online.

At the event, the new lunar explorers shared some high-minded goals, like reigniting moon exploration and jump-starting an age of space commerce.

“This is about developing a new generation of technology that is cheaper, can be used more often and will enable a new wave of explorers,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

Addressing the X Prize teams and journalists, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, compared his company’s support of the competition with other companies’ sponsorship of yacht races. “The idea we can help spur the return to the moon and maybe even do it more quickly than some of the national plans is really exciting to me,” Mr. Brin said.

Google will pay $20 million to the first team that lands on the moon, sends a package of data back to Earth, then travels at least 500 meters and sends another data package. The second team to accomplish the goals will win $5 million. Bonuses are offered for feats like visiting a historic landing site and finding and detecting lunar ice, but the prize money starts to shrink if the mission is not accomplished by 2012.

Dr. Whitaker of Carnegie Mellon is leading a team that includes the University of Arizona and Raytheon, the military contractor. He said he planned to use kerosene and oxygen to fuel his rocket, and once it is on the moon, to send a rover to the site of the first moon landing in the Sea of Tranquillity. “Our extravaganza will be at Apollo 11,” he said.

The overall effort could cost tens of millions of dollars, he said, easily exceeding the size of the prize purse.

Fred J. Bourgeois, the head of Frednet, the group of engineers who are collaborating online in the manner of open-source software developers, said that his team was building a toaster-size lunar lander that, once on the moon, would unleash a cellphone-size rover. “We think it’s a lot cheaper to put a cellphone on the moon than an S.U.V.,” Mr. Bourgeois said.

NASA has announced plans to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2020. Though robotic missions are easier to achieve, the X Prize competitors still face formidable challenges, not to mention extravagant costs. Generating the rocket thrust to escape Earth’s gravity is expensive and risky. Once on the moon, robotic rovers may have to survive temperatures that can drop to 250 degrees below zero.

There was some discord at the event. A video produced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting reasons to revisit the moon, described the mining of silicon, which is abundant in the lunar soil. The video claimed that the material could be used in space to construct solar-powered satellites that would transmit cheap and abundant energy to Earth.

In a question-and-answer session, Dr. Harold A. Rosen, an inventor of the geostationary satellite who is heading his own X Prize team, called that claim “one of the most outrageous ideas I’ve ever heard.” He added: “I can think of about a hundred thousand more efficient ways of getting energy on Earth than that.”

The X Prize Foundation is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that also managed the Ansari X Prize, a race between teams to send a manned rocket craft into suborbital space.

A team led by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan won that competition in 2004.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Google Competition, With a Robotic Moon Landing as a Goal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe